What Will a Sustainable Home be Like?

The connected house should not only be sustainable in its regulations of energy consumption and its harvesting, but the house should be transformative to its inhabitants as well as responding to their needs. Perhaps the way we inhabit our house, our rituals of inhabitation, will be influenced by this to become more sustainable in our social and human activities. With this in mind, the MIT Mobile Experience Lab is implementing a dual strategy of technological advancements as well as a social and cultural study of how a sustainable house works in the context of Trento, Italy.

Exterior

In partnership with Fondazione Bruno Kessler and other regional research organizations, the MIT Mobile Experience Lab will review the envelope of a sustainable house as a mediator between the inside and outside as well as an apparatus that works with solar orientation, rainwater retention, and effective passive cooling strategies. This envelope will then require strong parametric ideas of local application that is able to be effectively manufactured using CAD/CAM technology.

Interior

Traditionally the response and connectedness of a house was a simple actuation of non-empirical relationships. For example, the thermostat measures the temperature and humidity of the air at a remote location whereas the human occupancy can be widely ranging in number and activity. Better sensing of the life that unfolds in a home is necessary to create a robust relationship among the inhabitant, their home, and extended to the other homes that make a village.